Blogging the Buckeyes

Get Email Updates

Ohio State Headlines

Our Ohio State headlines email newsletter delivers Buckeyes athletics news from
The Dispatch. Sent weekday mornings and Saturday game days during football season. You'll
also be alerted when breaking news happens involving the Buckeyes.

Jessica Jerome was in second grade when she asked her parents if she could try ski jumping. Her
father’s first thought? No way!

All Peter Jerome knew about the sport was the introduction to
Wide World of Sports, which showed “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” — the
latter illustrated by a ski jumper crashing at the end of a takeoff ramp. No chance his daughter
would participate in such a dangerous enterprise.

But Jessica kept asking, and he eventually relented. In a sport that features top jumpers who
fly more than the length of a football field at more than 60 mph, his young daughter took off,
literally and figuratively.

She soon excelled, jumping mostly against boys, and, in time, began to envision herself
competing in the Olympics. And why not? Ski jumping was one of the original Olympic winter sports,
held at the first Winter Games in 1924. That dream was the beginning of a monumental 10-year
campaign to help young girls like Jessica achieve her Olympic goals. Because of such efforts — by
parents, athletes, coaches and other volunteers — women’s ski jumping will debut at the Sochi
Games.

Before letting women’s ski jumping into the Games, a decision made only in 2011, the IOC put
forth what seemed like a million baseless excuses, including the assertions that there weren’t
enough female competitors and that those who were jumping lacked technical expertise.

In 2005, the president of the International Ski Federation, Gian-Franco Kasper, even told an
interviewer that women shouldn’t compete in Olympic ski jumping because it “seems not to be
appropriate from a medical point of view.”

“I’ve had people ask me if my uterus had fallen out yet,” U.S. team member Lindsey Van said,
recounting the litany of arguments marshaled against women jumping. “I heard that multiple times;
it was comical. And embarrassing — not so much for me but for whoever said it.”

To win their place in the Olympics, female jumpers and their supporters had to do far more than
laugh off such spurious claims and wait for old-line resistance to thaw. They fought the IOC in the
name of equality and for all those who might want to follow in the footsteps of jumpers like Van,
29, the sport’s first female world champion.

Going into the Vancouver Games in 2010, Van held the record for the longest jump — by man or a
woman — on one of the hills to be used during the Olympics. That jump, had she been allowed to
duplicate it during the Games, would have put her in medal contention with the men.

Before she was so good that she could beat top men, Van was an 11-year-old phenom who said, “My
goal is to make the Olympic team in 2002, for girls.” What is a parent supposed to say to that?
Sorry, ski jumping in the Olympics is a dream only for boys?

Peter Jerome, a commercial airline pilot, initially thought it would be easy to rid ski jumping
of its men-only status. He said he thought to himself, “Wow, this is so unfair and discriminatory,
surely the IOC will work this out any day now.” He was wrong.

The national ski federation declined to help him find funding for female jumpers. He studied the
book “Nonprofit Kit for Dummies,” and in 2003 he formed Women’s Ski Jumping USA, which
inadvertently became a women’s rights advocacy group and led the push for women’s ski jumping in
the Olympics.

When the IOC wouldn’t budge, Women’s Ski Jumping USA supported a group of international women —
including Jessica Jerome and Van — who risked their careers to sue the Vancouver Olympics
organizing committee for inclusion in its 2010 Games. They lost, but the negative publicity
surrounding their lawsuit probably prompted the IOC to let women compete.

“I was confident that the day would come; we were too much of a force to be reckoned with. But I
didn’t know when,” Jessica Jerome, who turns 27 on Saturday, said of the IOC’s capitulation. “That’s
what was most unsettling about the whole process. No matter how much we tried or pushed, in the
end it wasn’t up to us. There were people’s minds we couldn’t change, no matter what.”

Van said that without Peter Jerome’s help, it would not have happened, though Jerome refuses to
acknowledge his instrumental role.

“I didn’t do much,” he said. “We just kind of shined the flashlight on the cockroaches.”

U.S. athletes — Jerome, Van and 2013 world champion Sarah Hendrickson — account for 10 percent
of the 30-athlete field for women’s ski jumping in Sochi, where Japan’s 17-year-old Sara Takanashi,
who has dominated the World Cup season, is the heavy gold-medal favorite.

Looking to the 2018 Olympics in South Korea, the pioneers of women’s ski jumping have their
sights set high.

“We’ve got our foot in the door with getting an event in the Olympics,” Jerome said. “From here,
we’re just going to keep going.”

Information from The New York Times and The Washington Post was used in this story.